


Despair 101

by Riona



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Dangan Ronpa fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 17:43:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7541959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riona/pseuds/Riona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being told to shoot each other with paintball guns ends badly enough at Greendale. Being told to actually <i>kill</i> each other probably isn't going to go much better.</p>
<p>(<i>Community/Dangan Ronpa</i> is a really, really ill-advised combination of fandoms, but I'm afraid that's what you're getting here. Knowledge of <i>Dangan Ronpa</i> is not required.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Despair 101

Even for Greendale, this is turning out to be an odd day. Everyone being called together in the cafeteria for a ‘big announcement’: par for the course. The Dean tearfully admitting that his position’s been usurped: unusual but not unheard of, and not _necessarily_ unpromising. But then...

“Show some respect, you bastards; this is your new dean speaking!”

“Wow,” Jeff says, quietly, glancing over at the Dean. The old dean. Still ‘the Dean’ in his head. “And I didn’t think any dean could look as ridiculous as you.”

Their ‘new dean’ appears to be a teddy bear, large by teddy bear standards and small by bear-bear standards, white on one side and black on the other. One of its eyes is a cute little button. One is a jagged, glowing scar.

“Oh, my God, it’s happening,” Troy whispers.

Jeff looks sharply at him. “You know what’s going on?”

“You don’t get it,” Troy says. “I’ve known teddy bears were out to get me since I was three.”

“I am Headmaster Monokuma,” the bear says. “Or Monobear, if you prefer. I know English speakers can be weird about this. What you call me doesn’t matter. I think you have other things to worry about.”

“I agree,” Abed says. “For instance, why did you say you’re the dean and then call yourself Headmaster? And what should we call the old dean?”

“Call me Craig,” the Dean suggests.

“I can’t do that,” Abed says.

“First order of business!” the bear announces. “All of the outer exits have been sealed. You are now locked into Greendale Community College.”

This seems unlikely to go anywhere good.

“I’m sure you all love your school and you’re delighted to be in permanent residence,” the bear says. “But, just in case a couple of you were hoping to leave at some point, there’s a way out!” He claps his paws together. “All you have to do is kill someone!”

Jeff sighs. He should’ve guessed.

“Upupupu... pu?” Monobear pauses. “Well, don’t all jump to react at once.”

Jeff rolls his eyes. “Not our first rodeo. Point us to the guns. Let’s just get this over with.”

“A keen student!” Monobear exclaims. “Top marks! But I’m not just going to provide you with guns. That’d take all the challenge out, don’t you think?”

“And how do you expect us to play paintball without guns, genius?” Jeff asks.

“Ah,” Monobear says. “I think there may have been a tiny misunderstanding.”

-

Okay. So apparently the bear _actually_ expects them to kill each other.

On the one hand, yeah, maybe paintball was getting a bit stale. On the other, Jeff’s... not really sure that this is an improvement.

“Okay,” Troy says. “Just to be clear. If we don’t want to stay at Greendale forever, _and_ we don’t want to kill anyone...?”

“Well, if you’re lucky, you might be a victim,” Monobear says.

“That’s a big help,” Troy says. “Thanks.”

“You can’t go back to your homes, obviously,” Monobear says, “so you’ll be staying in on-campus accommodation! Unfortunately, there are only enough rooms for one between two. Better sleep with someone you can trust!”

Troy and Abed do their handshake immediately. No surprises there.

“I’m sleeping with Jeffrey,” the Dean says, almost as quickly.

“First of all, if you’re speaking euphemistically: no, you’re not,” Jeff says. “Second, if you’re _not_ speaking euphemistically: no. You’re not.”

“But I have the nicest accommodation on campus!” the Dean protests. “There’s hand soap!”

That gets Jeff’s attention. “You have an en-suite?”

“Well, no,” the Dean admits. “But there’s hand soap. And I’d certainly never kill you, although you _would_ look very fetching stuffed—”

“I’m with Shirley,” Jeff says.

“What, because a Christian would never murder someone?” Britta asks, with a snort. “Tell that to the Middle Ages.”

“Because she’s my friend and I trust her,” Jeff says. “The Christian morality is just a bonus.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Shirley says, smiling.

“Oh,” Annie says, twisting her hands together. “Are you sure, Jeff? Because... I was kind of hoping _we_ could share a room.”

Then again, maybe there are other bonuses worth considering. Jeff stares at Annie for a moment before he finds his voice. “Yeah, I could share with Annie.”

“Yeah, I bet you could,” Shirley says darkly.

“After all I’ve done for you, Jeffrey,” the Dean whispers, pressing a hand over his collarbone. His _own_ collarbone, thankfully, rather than Jeff’s.

Honestly, there’s a part of Jeff that’s tempted to take the Dean up on his offer. There’s a part of Jeff that reminds him that the Dean is likely to leave himself exposed – ahem, open – _vulnerable_ around Jeff. An easy target. A ticket out of here.

It’s not a side of himself Jeff likes. He needs to room with someone he’s definitely, definitely not going to be tempted to kill.

“So you’re leaving me with the atheist,” Shirley says. “Hope you’ve made your peace with that.”

“Ex _cuse_ me?” Britta asks.

“How do I know you’re not plotting to kill me right now, huh?” Shirley demands. “You don’t think there’s anyone to hold you accountable.”

“Shirley, Britta is not going to kill you,” Jeff says, rolling his eyes. “She’s way too obsessed with being a good person. She would hold _herself_ accountable for the rest of her life.”

“Not exactly the judgement of the Lord, is it?” Shirley asks. “Doesn’t exactly strike fear into your soul, the judgement of Britta. I’m not counting on that to keep me alive.”

“Why do you care, anyway?” Britta snaps back. “You think you’ll go to Heaven, right?”

There’s a pause.

“That is true,” Shirley admits.

“Okay,” Jeff says. “That’s settled. Troy is with Abed, Britta’s with Shirley, I’m with Annie, and nobody is going to get murdered.”

-

It doesn’t feel real. Jeff stares down at the body, and somehow all he can think is that he’ll never have a reason to say ‘shut up, Leonard’ again.

Shirley crosses herself. Britta and Annie have their arms around each other. The Dean is sobbing into the carpet. Troy took one look at the body and ran. Even Abed looks a little shaken.

“Outside my office,” the Dean whispers. “How did this happen outside my office?”

“I didn’t think anyone would really do it,” Shirley says, quietly.

It’s pretty much how Jeff feels. It all felt kind of like a big Greendale joke up until now, just another ridiculous thing happening at this school. But apparently someone took it seriously, and now the rest of them are going to have to take it seriously as well.

“How did that bear take over from you?” Jeff asks. “Do you have any idea who’s behind it?”

The Dean shakes his head, gulps down air, tries twice to speak before he eventually manages it. “I bought it online.”

There’s a pause.

“You _bought_ that thing?” Shirley asks.

“So you’re the one controlling it?” Jeff asks. “ _You_ told us to kill each other?”

The Dean shakes his head again. “It’s some sort of AI or remote-controlled robot or something. I bought it from a Japanese girl. She was selling it as a funny prank you could do at your school. She said it would make me a more popular dean.” He stares desperately at Leonard’s corpse.

Abed clicks his tongue. “I’ve watched enough films to tell you that dealing with Japanese girls never ends well.”

“I thought it was cute!” the Dean says, almost in tears. “I didn’t think anyone would actually take it seriously! ‘Kill someone to leave’ – I mean, the doors weren’t even locked!”

“ _What?_ ” Britta demands.

In retrospect, maybe they should have tried the doors.

“Okay,” Jeff says. “I’m getting out of here. The police can deal with this.”

“No!” The Dean clings to his front. “No, Jeffrey, the police can’t know about this! I’ll be in so much trouble! They’ll shut down the school!”

“Someone was _murdered_ ,” Jeff points out. “This is definitely the kind of thing the police are meant to look at.”

“Yes, but – but – look, Jeffrey, I know I’m not supposed to play favourites, but it was only Leonard.”

Honestly, as little as he’d like to admit it, Jeff can almost see where the Dean is coming from there. There’s a part of him that’s just glad that, if someone was killed, it wasn’t a member of his study group. Not a nice thing to think, and not fair to Leonard or to anyone who mysteriously liked him, but he can’t pretend it’s not at the back of his mind.

Still, it’s probably best not to agree openly when Shirley and Britta are making scandalised noises in the background.

“I’m not sure ‘playing favourites’ is the biggest problem with that statement,” Jeff says. “And I’m out of here.”

“ _No_ ,” the Dean says.

Jeff raises his eyebrows. “What, you’re going to stop me?”

“The doors are locked _now_ ,” the Dean says. “I can’t have a murderer running around my school. We need to get to the bottom of this.”

Jeff stares at him.

“You realise what you’ve done is lock us in with a murderer, right?” he asks.

There’s a pause.

“All right,” the Dean says. “For now, let’s just _assume_ the murderer only wanted to kill Leonard. If anyone else gets killed, I’ll admit I was wrong and I’ll let us out so they can’t do any more damage.”

Jeff stares _harder_. “You’ve just given us exactly the same conditions as the bear did. We’re locked in, and we only get out if we kill someone.”

The Dean throws up his hands. “What do you want me to do, Jeffrey?”

“I don’t know, but _not encouraging murder_ might be a start.”

“It’s too late. I’ve made a decision. I can’t change it now.”

“Even though it’s obviously a bad decision?” Britta asks. “Even though it became clear, like, three seconds after you made it that it was a bad decision? You can say you don’t have a choice, but you haven’t even invoked Article 50 yet and—”

“Britta,” Jeff says, quietly, “you’re getting your causes mixed up again.”

Britta shakes her head. “You haven’t even made an announcement yet, so you can’t tell us you can’t change things.”

The Dean bolts into his office.

“Crap,” Jeff mutters as the PA system comes on.

-

“I’m not seeing any signs of a wound,” Annie says, examining Leonard’s body. She’s clearly trying to be professional about this, but Jeff can see the way her hands are shaking. “Poison, maybe?”

The Dean nods and takes notes, like this is a serious murder investigation and not a horrible farce that’s probably just going to end in more murders. Jeff wants to scream at him.

Annie takes a deep breath and lets it out again. “So it might be worth checking what the chemistry department has and whether anything’s been tampered with. But it’d be best if we could find out exactly how he died.”

“Actually,” the Dean says, “can the medical school take a look at him? Would that be disrespectful?”

Jeff winces. “Thank you for that unsettling reminder that I might one day be operated on by someone who trained _here_.”

“They’re severely underfunded,” the Dean says, “and getting an actual _cadaver_... well, it’d be like Christmas.”

“Great,” Jeff says. “I’m glad someone’s going to be happy about this. While you’re tying a bow on it for them, can you ask if they can work out anything about the cause of death?”

-

Annie’s quiet for a long time after they retire to their shared dorm room. Which makes sense. It’s been twelve hours since they found Leonard that morning, and it still doesn’t really feel like it’s sunk in.

“I hate this,” she says eventually, very quietly.

“I don’t think you’re alone there,” Jeff says, leaning back against the wall. His hands feel empty without his phone in them. He still doesn’t understand how that bear apparently managed to block out cell reception. “Nobody’s having a great time right now. Except maybe the medical students.”

“We’re trapped in here with a murderer,” Annie says. “And it could be _anyone_. It could be one of our study group. It could be you.”

There’s a twinge in his chest at the thought she suspects him. “Look, I know I can be a selfish ass, but I didn’t kill Leonard. And no one from our study group did either.”

“You’re sure?” Annie asks. “Don’t you find it hard to trust our friends?”

“Not really,” Jeff says, with a shrug. “I know it was Chang.”

Annie stares at him. “Chang? How?”

“The Dean made a teddy bear tell us all to murder each other as a bad joke,” Jeff says. “Someone actually took it seriously. _Obviously_ it’s Chang.”

“So you don’t think one of us would be capable of it?” Annie asks.

Jeff frowns slightly, considering. “Well, maybe not so early on. I’d like to think we would at least have a few days of internal conflict before we started killing people.”

“So you think it might start around now?”

This conversation is getting uncomfortable. He stares at the wall. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Is _he_ getting a bit murderous by this point? He’d like to think he isn’t. But it’s been days in this tense, suspicious atmosphere, and someone is dead already, and if he just _happened_ to run into Chang unguarded...

Annie’s incapable of attacking without giving a battle cry, and that’s what saves him. He jerks around instinctively and grabs her wrist, expecting a punch and finding a knife there instead.

“Holy shit,” Jeff says.

Annie bursts into tears.

Jeff stands there, his grip white-knuckled on Annie’s wrist, and his vision is starting to swim. This is real. He can feel her pulse. He _actually_ just nearly got stabbed by one of his closest friends. “Holy _shit_ , Annie.”

Annie grabs a handful of his shirt and almost collapses against him; Jeff has to put his arms around her to keep her upright. She’s shaking all over. Jeff eases the knife out of her grasp, very carefully, and throws it across the room.

“I’m sorry,” Annie whispers.

“Did that just happen?” Jeff asks.

“I’m glad you stopped me. I think I wanted you to stop me. I think that’s why I didn’t wait until you were asleep.”

She’s been thinking about stabbing him in his sleep? Jesus. “Please tell me you weren’t planning to kill me when you first said we should room together.”

“No,” Annie says. “Not really. I didn’t _want_ to.”

“Okay,” Jeff says. “Just ‘no’ would have been fine.”

She’s shaking really badly. He eases her down onto the bed, so he can hold her without having to focus so hard on staying upright himself. Are you meant to find yourself comforting someone after they try to stab you? Maybe not.

“Do you actually... want me dead?” How the hell is this a question he has to ask?

Annie shakes her head fiercely. “No! Of course not! It would be terrible! But... well, I know you let your guard down around me sometimes.”

She just went for him because he’s an easy target? Is that... better? There’s a lot he doesn’t know how to react to here.

“I can’t die in here,” Annie sobs into his chest. “I had a _plan_. I was going to have a _life_. I just – I had to get out. You understand, right? I _had_ to.”

“By stabbing me in the chest,” Jeff says. He’s still kind of hung up on that.

“In the throat,” Annie corrects him. “I wasn’t going to make you _suffer_.” She presses her face against his collar and dissolves into tears again.

Jeff strokes her hair and stares into space. There’s a scream in his throat, but it doesn’t seem to want to come out. Maybe it’s just going to live there from now on.

-

“The medical students have given their verdict!” the Dean announces, coming into the study room with his arms full of books. Jeff really hopes those aren’t the verdict. If they’re going to have to sit here and listen to the Dean reading through twenty notebooks aloud, they’re definitely going to have a second corpse on their hands.

And there it is again: the shivery realisation that _he_ was almost the second corpse. He’s had to ask Annie to stop apologising. It hasn’t really helped him stop thinking about it.

“They were so happy to have a real cadaver to study at last,” the Dean says, a little wistfully. “It would have brought a tear to your eye.”

“Great,” Jeff says. “And once they’d finished skipping around like happy little elves, what did they tell you about the killer?”

The Dean beams. “Leonard died of a heart attack.”

There’s a pause.

“So...” Jeff begins.

“He died of natural causes!” the Dean exclaims, half-laughing in relief. “That’s way easier to spin than murder. He came to Greendale and loved it so much he spent the rest of his life here. There’s no murderer! We were safe all along!”

“We were told to kill each other,” Abed points out. “We were only safe if none of us had the _potential_ to be a murderer.”

Britta bites her lip and shifts in her seat. Jeff only sees it because he’s very carefully not looking at Annie.

“We solved the mystery!” the Dean says, brightly. “And now we know – we _know_ , Abed – there’s no murderer in our school. So I’ll unlock the exits, and I’m going to give the young lady who sold me that bear a two-star review on Amazon, and we can all sleep soundly in our beds tonight.”

Jeff glances over at Annie. Annie immediately looks down at the table.

He’s not sure either of them is going to be getting sound sleep for a while.

“What happened to the evil bear?” Troy asks, glancing around edgily. “Is it gonna stop you letting us out?”

“I boxed it up and mailed it to City College,” the Dean says. “Everything’s fine.”

Maybe it’d be best to avoid the news for the next few weeks.

“Are those notebooks?” Annie asks suddenly, nodding towards the mess of white pages and black covers in the Dean’s arms. There’s a hunger in her eyes. There’s something reassuring, Jeff finds, in seeing that she’s not so traumatised she can’t still appreciate office supplies.

“Oh, the seller sent these with the bear,” the Dean says. “I was going to get rid of them. I don’t know if there’s anything _wrong_ with them, but it seemed best to be safe.”

“Oh, I see,” Britta says. “How many trees died to make those books? And now you’re just going to make their sacrifice meaningless. Not very _green_ of you, Mr Greendale.”

The Dean shifts uncomfortably. “I suppose we could find a use for them.”

Jeff plucks one of the books out of the pile. “ _Death Note_?” he reads from the cover. “Give them to the criminology department. They’ll love the gothic branding.” Plus Annie will get one of them, and she’s looking increasingly like she might explode if these notebooks escape her.

The Dean shrugs. “Well, they’re just notebooks. How much harm can they do?” He adjusts his grip on the books. “And I guess I already gave a couple to the medical school last week, anyway. They really are _tragically_ underfunded.”


End file.
